Williams a creative whirlwind

Covering manic comic not easy for reporters

Hey there, time traveller!This article was published 11/8/2014 (850 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the course of a couple of decades covering the movie beat, I've seen Robin Williams multiple times. Or rather, I bore witness to Robin Williams.

The first time was at a junket for the Disney animated movie Aladdin in 1992. The thing one had to keep in mind about Williams throughout his career was a press conference was just another audience for him. The room might have been much smaller than the auditoriums he usually filled. But he took the duties of the round-table interview as an opportunity to perform.

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES

Robin Williams holds back fans during a break in shooting The Big White in Winnipeg in 2004. Purchase Photo Print

I learned immediately doing a press conference with Williams was hysterically funny. Writing a story about that press conference was next to impossible.

Think about the way Williams delivered a monologue. You could transcribe a single sentence easily enough. But it would be much more difficult to describe his trademark embellishments.

One second, he's imitating the vocal swoops of a southern evangelist, the next, John Wayne, and next, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And that was in a single minute. How do you transcribe creative lightning to paper?

I'm glad Aladdin was my first face-to-face with him. That and all subsequent interview experiences never failed to suggest the handy image of a genie being released from a bottle and exploding with energy pent up over millennia.

* * *

When Williams came to Winnipeg in 2004 to make a dark comedy called The Big White (penned by former local boy Collin Friesen), I missed the chance to talk to him. My closest exposure was catching a glimpse of him between takes in a house on Burrows Avenue. He was restlessly poking around the garage, peeking into stored boxes of Christmas ornaments. I could only assume he was looking for either a prop or inspiration.

He proved to be more readily available later on. A Winnipeg couple spied Williams in the bar of the Fort Garry Hotel and invited him to say hello to the graduating class of a Junior Achievement program at a banquet they had organized on the seventh floor. Williams did more than say hello, he stayed for more than half an hour, signing autographs and posing for photographs among the estimated 165 guests.

* * *

The last time I saw Williams was back on the junket circuit in Los Angeles, where he was promoting a movie called License to Wed, in 2007. He played a demanding minister intent on preparing a young couple (John Krasinski and Mandy Moore) for matrimony.

Typical Williams press conference: He was funnier than the movie, at one point breaking into the Krasinski-Moore portion of the show to warn the wholesome Moore not to take the career paths of Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears. Williams described Moore's chaste but sexy appeal as: "It's like the Amish girl who KNOWS."

"Pam Dawber had it," he said, referring to his Mork & Mindy star of decades earlier. "This kind of wholesome sensuality where a lot of guys will come up and say, 'You ever do Mindy?' "

In that last line, um, Williams put on the voice of a blue-collar doofus.

The four essential Robin Williams movies

1. Aladdin (1992)

Even if he didn't appear in the flesh, the role of the Genie in the Disney animated feature Aladdin gave Williams the best opportunity he ever had to translate his anarchic comedy persona to film, with the added benefit of giving the comedian the opportunity to not just vocally but literally morph into other people.

2. The Fisher King (1991)

In the role of the demented street person Parry in Terry Gilliam's comedy-drama, Williams essayed madness and had fun doing it. But when Parry's tragic backstory emerges, Williams synthesized his comic persona with a darker, sadder entity. Given the circumstances of his death, one could make a case this role may have hewed closest to Williams' creative soul.

3. The Birdcage (1996)

It takes a certain generosity as a comic actor to take the role of straight man and yield the comedy to someone else, which is what Williams did as Armand, the grounded half of a gay relationship opposite the hysterical (literally and figuratively) Nathan Lane. Even so, the scene in which Williams teaches Lane to walk like a straight man is something of a comedy master class.

4. Good Will Hunting (1997)

Williams won a supporting actor Oscar in the role of a damaged psychiatrist and with good reason. Williams had trained for drama, was sidelined -- very successfully -- into comedy, but in this movie, he proved he had the purely dramatic goods.

History

Updated on Tuesday, August 12, 2014 at 10:19 AM CDT: adds video

11:04 AM: adds randall king's essential movie list

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